Rumsfeld Up, Romney Down

by Richard Miniter

Shunned by the MSM, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is still a rock star in some quarters. He wowed the crowd at the American Spectator’s annual dinner Wednesday night. His most memorable line: “We need to think less about exit strategies and more about victory.” He talked about the duty of free people to establish democracy in the Arab world, not because American power gives us the right to plant an alien flower in desert soil, but because it is in our national interest to plow up the seed beds of radical Islam.

Most telling was a soldier who lost his leg below the knee in Iraq. He interupted his conversation with me to hobble over to Rumsfeld, who was stopped on his way out by endless requests for pictures. I watched him stand, with the right leg of his khaki pants pinned up to lower thigh, waiting for a chance to catch the outgoing Defense Secretary’s eye. He just wanted to shake his hand and say some words. He was overwhelmed when Rumsfeld asked him if he wanted a picture. He did, but he didn’t want to ask.

As the flash bulb flared, it became clear that even the most reviled Defense Secretary since Robert Strange MacNamara still has fans: true-believing conservatives and Iraq war veterans. That second group suggests that the volunteer soldiers sent to Iraq do not all consider themselves victims, as the MSM would have us believe.

Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachussetts, hopes to move into the White House in 2009, but failed to ignite even the American Spectator’s stalwart audience. His speech was a waterfall of platitudes, seemingly ripped from the pages of a 1964 edition of Reader’s Digest. In a reprise of his stint running the Olympic Games in Utah (natch!), he told the story of an American athlete crying when he won the gold. Was he crying because he was number one in the world? Romeny asked. No, he was crying because American had won. Everyone at my table rolled their eyes. Later, I surveyed members of the crowd, asking open-ended questions about the Romeny speech. Several women said they thought he was attractive for his age, but their responses ranged from “Sounds like my grandmother” and “I can’t believe he gave us some cut and paste speech.”

No one mentioned the Mormon angle. He was just seen as a telegenic dud.

The next night, at the Federalist Society’s yearly black-tie bash, I asked National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez—“KLO” to her friends—and Romney’s biggest booster what she thought of her man. She pointedly said that Republicans should keep their options open for 2008. It seems that support for Romney is cooling among conservatives.

Two Supreme Court Justices spoke to the conservative legal associations: Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Alito, in one of his few public addresses since being sworn, proved to have a dry but effective sense of humor which can’t be replicated here. That was a surprise.

The final surprise was something that did not happen. No one that I spoke to at either dinner griped about the 2006 congressional elections. It was time to move on, not sulk.